I didn’t read it as egocentric. The author cares a lot about correctness and delivering high quality work, but the definition of quality or good is very limited in scope.
I don’t doubt the veracity of what the author wrote, but I would guess that if we spoke to the counter-parties, their recollection of certain things would be very different.
How people perceive the world and express themselves vary, and some people don’t jive well. I have a developer on my team who is very literal person, if I say “I could kill that guy”, he doesn’t capture the nuance. But he is brilliant, a friend and trusted colleague. A good leader should get that and adjust.
I believe it is unintentionally egocentric to assume a single individual's perspective is enough to guarantee correctness. I imagine most of the time that individual makes the best call, but that's not less egocentric. It's easy for an individual to qualify the correctness of technical material, but not easy to do the same for soft skills like communication. As a senior developer or leader, you need some egocentricity in order to have a focused project and clear goals.
> I know better than to argue intangibles such as coding style or software architecture, but some things in Computer Science are just facts: we can verify them. I don't care much for saying false things to appease someone's ego. In cases like this, I'm not the one who can't acknowledge being wrong.
Yes, there's some ego in that. Author won't back down.
But clearly, the author isn't the ultimate arbiter of truth. Some things are objectively true.
I don’t doubt the veracity of what the author wrote, but I would guess that if we spoke to the counter-parties, their recollection of certain things would be very different.
How people perceive the world and express themselves vary, and some people don’t jive well. I have a developer on my team who is very literal person, if I say “I could kill that guy”, he doesn’t capture the nuance. But he is brilliant, a friend and trusted colleague. A good leader should get that and adjust.